Literature and crime live in happy symbiosis. Literature often depends on crime for a good story, and that story in turn frequently yields important insights about crime. If many of the Great Books involve crime, this comes as no surprise.
DANIEL J. KORNSTEIN
To reveal something deep and timeless about human nature, a writer needs a special tension for the story's action and the characters' development. What better than a plot that involves a broken taboo; a violation of natural, religious, or human law; sin, punishment, guilt and redemption? That is one reason why crime, with all these perennial characteristics in abundance, often serves…
Whatever the reason, literature relies heavily on crime, but not always in the same way. Fiction writers use crime in their work in two different ways. In one type, represented by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, crime and its consequences are the primary focus. In the other, crime is a subordinate though often crucial theme of the…
In the mid-nineteenth century, a new form of crime literature arose: the detective or mystery novel. Invented by Edgar Allan Poe in America, this genre usually has a crime or mystery to be solved and a highly intelligent hero who, through logic or patient investigation or preternatural understanding of the criminal mind, finds the solution. Poe's stories "The Purloined Letter"…
Writers have long described prison as a state of mind rather than a place of confinement. Hamlet tells his false friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Denmark seems to be a prison. "We think not so, my lord," says Rosencrantz. Replies Hamlet insightfully, "why, then 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a pri…
Literature has a rich tapestry of criminal identities, and is particularly good at depicting the guilty conscience. In Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark has a play about a murder performed to see if Claudius will betray his guilt, which he does. Similarly, Macbeth strains out loud under the burden of his heavy conscience. And, of course, we have Dostoevsky's portrayal of Raskolnikov's ev…
Crime in literature helps us better understand crime in life. "A crime is, in the first instance, a defect in the reasoning powers," wrote Balzac in Cousin Bette, and that mid-nineteenth century literary insight is both piercing and fruitful (Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette 422 (James Waring, trans. Everyman's Library, 1991)). Much of crime can be explained by Balzac's t…
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